Om användaren själv får välja : svenska akademiska biblioteks dokumenterade uppfattningar om förvärv

Sammanfattning: Making decisions on what to acquire and what not to acquire is, and has been for centuries, a task that librarians are relied on to perform. Over the recent decades focus in acquisitions has turned slightly away from the expertise of the librarians towards the needs of the library users. Reasons for the turn has been lacking financial funds and a desire to increase service in libraries. The effect of this turn has resulted in that library users are encouraged to, and sometimes even expected to, contribute to the collection development by communicating their literature needs to the librarians. To manage collection development and to set a standard for the library, acquisition policies are often produced. The aim of this study is to increase the understanding of how Swedish academic libraries value their users’ influence on acquiring information resources through different manners of user-driven acquisition models. In accomplishing the aim 31 collection development policies have been collected from Swedish academic libraries. The policies have undergone an analysis called What’s the problem represented to be?. The method was created by Carol Bacchi, whom has been greatly inspired by Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis in her creation, and theoretical questions of power and representation permeate it. Results from this analysis point to user influence on acquisitions as something valuable to the libraries. Often times some users are more valuable than others though. In most policies the user-driven acquisitions rely on library users to make purchase recommendations at the library or on the library homepage. One of the main reasons for wanting users to contribute to the collection development is that literature acquired on demand of users are borrowed to a greater extent. In evaluations literature that is used more comes out as the more economic choice which is what the librarians are aiming for.